Skip to main content

Past Exhibitions

Browse the chronological list of past exhibitions at the Saint Louis University Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCRA), or search for a specific exhibition. Click “View” for more information about an exhibition. If you need further information about an exhibition, please contact us.

Lesley Dill: Dream World of the Forest

Lesley Dill: Dream World of the Forest

August 24, 2022 to October 16, 2022

MOCRA is pleased to present three new collage-paintings by Lesley Dill, an American artist who works at the intersection of language and fine art in sculpture, printmaking, installation and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze and music—works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself.

The three works on display are composed of Asian mulberry paper, joined as squares using a glue fusion technique. The imagery and text are made from a combination of acrylic paint and intricately hand-cut paper imagery, subtly webbed by Dill’s trademark addition of delicate hanging threads. Dill dissolves and recombines texts, breaking phrases into words and words into letters set in variegated fonts. The disrupted syntax challenges our accustomed linearity of reading and thinking, and opens up new possibilities of meaning and understanding

Dream World of the Forest is a follow-up to Dill’s series Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, which amplifies voices of the North American past as they wrestle with divinity, deviltry, and freedom, including Mother Ann Lee, Black Hawk, Sojourner Truth, John Brown, Emily Dickinson, Horace Pippin and Sister Gertrude Morgan.

Dill is also fascinated by the wilderness as a simultaneously physical and psychic landscape. She spent much of her childhood following pathways in the shadowed Adirondack and Maine woods, on trails cut by deer, bear, rabbits and porcupine. These memories and her ongoing exploration of transcendent experiences are joined in these new works, which beckon us into untamed territory inhabited by prophetic and poetic texts and visionary imagery. Venturing onto these unmarked paths entails risk, but may lead to insight, wisdom, and transformation.

Lesley Dill: Dream World of the Forest is presented at MOCRA courtesy of Lesley Dill and the Nohra Haime Gallery.

Lesley Dill (b. 1950) has had over one hundred solo exhibitions. Her artworks are in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2017 she was named a fellow of The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and is a Joan Mitchell Foundation Creating A Living Legacy artist and grant recipient. Her opera, Divide Light, based on the poems of Emily Dickinson, was performed in San Jose in 2008. In 2018 the opera was re-staged in New York City and captured in an award-winning film by Ed Robbins. Dill was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s 2019 ‘Tell it Slant’ Award. Dill’s exhibition Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me, organized by the Figge Art Museum, is currently traveling to 7 venues through Winter of 2023.

Dill is represented by Nohra Haime Gallery in New York and Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

above:
Lesley Dill, When the Deer Talk to Me, 2022. Hand-cut paper, acrylic paint, and thread on mulberry paper. Courtesy of Lesley Dill and the Nohra Haime Gallery.

Related programming

Artist, Poet, Curator: A Conversation with Lesley Dill, Tom Sleigh and Rene Paul Barilleaux

Watch Artist, Poet, Curator: A Conversation with Lesley Dill, Tom Sleigh and Rene Paul Barilleaux